This is a postscript to yesterday's post on Wallace Berry, where Robert Fink's notation was adopted for part of the analysis graphic. Fink demonstrated the extent to which ascending linear gestures are present in Beethoven's Missa solemnis and the Fifth and Ninth Symphonies (1994, 88-216; 1999, 108-13). Although many of these are long-range patterns (in the sense that their elements are distributed over large segments of the music), they differ from Urlinie forms, as Fink carefully and deliberately avoids tying the gestures to harmony and voice leading hierarchies, his goal being to show how what he calls "energies," or the irrational movement of desire, can play out independently of the "logic" of harmonic functional hierarchies. Hearing an "arbitrary" rising chromatic gesture in the close of the Credo of the Missa solemnis, for example, Fink generalizes to say that "Even in a tonal work ultimately ruled by a voice leading hierarchy, this way of hearing drives a transgressive wedge between the surface and the depths" (1999, 113).
Rising gestures are appropriate (perhaps even the simplest and most direct) figures for Fink's theory, which avoids universal forms. Setting the image of a ball on a hillside against the experience of goal-directed motion in listening to a piece of music, Fink says that "In the case of the ball, the surroundings are the earth and its gravitational pull; in the case of a musical piece, the surroundings are the listener's musical consciousness and the pull of expectations and desire" (1994, 30). The "crucial difference" between the two is that: "the pull of desire is for each musical experience essentially self-created, unlike gravity." This is basically another example of flipping binaries: depths/surface in linear analysis necessarily favors the first term; the "transgressive wedge" shifts attention to the unmarked term, and one ends up with a cluster: surface/desire//depths/[design].
Fink's "flat hierarchy" is not an attempt to reconcile "surfaces" with Schenkerian practice but to displace (do away with?) the latter. His mode is essentially polemical and as a result he can offer no defense against long-standing scientific demonstrations that hierarchy plays a fundamental role in cognition, even though in hardly so monolithic a manner, perhaps, as Lerdahl continues to insist in Tonal Pitch Space.
References.
Fink, Robert. "Arrows of Desire: Long-range Linear Structure and the Transformation of Musical Energy." PhD diss. University of California, Berkeley, 1994.
Fink, Robert. "Going Flat: Post-Hierarchical Music Theory and the Musical Surface." In Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist, eds. Rethinking Music, 102-137. 2d ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Lerdahl, Fred. Tonal Pitch Space. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
